In recent years, part of this identity has become Nintendo’s resistance to the convergence of gaming and mobile technologies. Despite consistent analyst and investor pressure for Nintendo to take advantage of the explosion of gaming on phones and tablets to help offset a downturn in console performance, Nintendo resisted, with President and CEO Satoru Iwata going as far to suggest in 2013 that “If we think 20 years down the line, we may look back at the decision not to supply Nintendo games to smartphones and think that is the reason why the company is still here.”

It was therefore surprising when Nintendo announced a partnership with Japanese mobile platform developer DeNA to move into the mobile gaming space. There had been no warning that Nintendo’s philosophy on this issue had changed, even at a recent investor briefing in Tokyo. Suddenly, Nintendo has plans to have games available for mobile platforms by the end of the year, with Mario, Link, and other Nintendo characters in games competing with the likes of Clash of Clans and Game of War. While initial speculation questioned if Nintendo would play any type of development role, or if their biggest franchises would be involved, when the dust settled it was clear: developers at Nintendo are at work creating mobile games utilizing a limitless range of Nintendo IPs, which DeNA will make available across a wide range of platforms.

The gameplay of the Fire Emblem series—and other Strategy RPGs from developer Intelligent Systems—is a logical fit for touch-screen gaming.

There is no shortage of response to this news: indeed, the level of mainstream press engagement with Nintendo’s decision reveals the degree to which Nintendo franchises have the potential to do extremely well in the mobile space. Within the gaming enthusiast press, meanwhile, sites immediately began speculating on what franchises would be a great fit for mobile gaming, imagining games like the Strategy RPG Fire Emblem as perfect fits for the mobile space. However, at the same time, others—like WIRED’s Chris Kohler—pointed out that those imagining a game like Fire Emblem on mobile platforms are overlooking the realities of mobile gaming, and that Nintendo is more likely to develop streamlined F2P (Free to Play) games that cost less to make, have endless revenue potential, and don’t directly compete with Nintendo’s existing handheld games (like an upcoming Fire Emblem title set to release on Nintendo 3DS later this year).

Nintendo, for their part, is remaining vague. The announcement notably came without the reveal of a single mobile game, and in a feature interview with TIME Iwata offered little detail regarding Nintendo’s specific plans beyond the fact that “we believe that we will be able to use smart devices in a very unique way so that they can be a bridge to our dedicated game systems, and at the same time, that we will be able to deliver unique experiences to the users of smart devices.” When pushed on the types of payment models, Iwata was similarly cagey, leaving the door open for “free-to-start” games —a term less common than “free-to-play,” and most recently associated with “Full Game Demos” on consoles—while simultaneously noting that “it’s even more important for us to consider how we can get as many people around the world as possible to play Nintendo smart device apps, rather than to consider which payment system will earn the most money.”

Nintendo’s relationship to licensed mobile gaming could be previewed by a Mario-themed version of iOS title Puzzle & Dragons, which developer GungHo is bringing to Nintendo’s 3DS later this year.

Here, I would argue, we see the inherent tension in Nintendo’s announcement. The reason no games were announced is because this is a business decision as opposed to a gaming one. Nintendo is effectively licensing their IPs onto mobile devices as a way of extending their franchises to new audiences—Iwata’s emphasis on global reach makes clear that this decision is about using the proliferation of mobile devices as a new awareness platform, with no plans to port existing games onto the systems (which has been a pattern for other game creators like Final Fantasy developer Square Enix). In this way, it is framed similarly to an animated film deal Nintendo was allegedly pursuing with Sony (as revealed in the midst of 2014’s Sony Hack), with mobile devices less a new gaming platform—signaling Nintendo abandoning exclusively developing for its own hardware platforms—than a new way of leveraging and promoting existing IP. This business decision was well-received, with Nintendo stock leaping 27% following the announcement.

At the same time, though, Nintendo is still committed to games. And so while from a business perspective it would make sense for Nintendo to treat mobile as a space of licensing, with other developers creating games using its franchises, the company’s larger commitment to being a “game company” doesn’t allow them to do so. In addition to announcing Nintendo’s next piece of hardware—Project NX—to renew their commitment to their own platforms, Iwata is promising Nintendo’s innovation will extend to mobile gaming, telling TIME that “while we want more people to become familiar with Nintendo IP through Nintendo’s smart device game apps, at the same time, we aim to provide smart device consumers with unique experiences with our game apps.”

Whether or not Nintendo can transform licensed mobile gaming into a space of innovation remains to be seen, but for now discursive transformation is the next best thing. Nintendo needs to acknowledge the evolution of mobile gaming as a threat against their existing handheld gaming business, but they are doing so in ways that frame mobile gaming as a lesser space that Nintendo needs to elevate, and which exists to compliment—rather than threaten—existing distribution models. The long-term tenability of this position remains unclear, but the increased mobility of Mario and the rest of Nintendo’s brand is set to give us our answer.

Ten (or more) media industry news items you might have missed recently.

1) Two weeks ago was E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo), the largest trade fair for the video game industry, and, as usual, there were several major stories coming out of the event. The biggest seemed to be Sony’s massive ‘victory’ over Microsoft in the press conferences focusing on each’s next-generation entertainment consoles available this holiday, the PlayStation 4 and XBox One, respectively. Besides undercutting Microsoft’s console by $100, Sony scored major consumer points by directly attacking Microsoft’s announced DRM policies including a required internet connection and restrictions on sharing/loaning games. Sony was clearly feeling confident, releasing this humorous video of PlayStation execs showing people the ‘complicated’ process of sharing games on their new system:

2) Yet the even bigger news took place the week following E3, as Microsoft, following an outpouring of negative consumer and media feedback and loss of pre-sales on Amazon against the PlayStation, pulled a complete 180 on the XBox One’s restrictive DRM policies. Gone are the regular on-line checks and restrictions on borrowing. While it is too early to tell if such a bold reversal will affect Microsoft’s PR woes in the long-run, they have already overtaken the PS4 on UK Amazon pre-orders.

3) Fox Searchlight Pictures has lost a lawsuit brought against them by two interns on the film Black Swan after a Federal District Court found them in violation of minimum-wage laws for not paying the production interns who were treated essentially as regular employees. The judge found the environment too similar to a regular waged position and not enough of a training/educational program to be considered unpaid. While this is a massive victory for unpaid labor in the film and media industry, many have already noted this could become a landmark decision for future cases of internship exploitation in a variety of fields.

4) Attention bachelorettes: Rupert Murdoch will soon be back on the market. Murdoch and wife Wendi Deng have filed for divorce. While Deng and the couple’s children will retain financial interest in News Corp, they do not get voting rights. In slightly less tabloid-y news, News Corp’s publishing and entertainment arms have started trading separately as a preliminary stage before the official split later this month.

5) And just to keep things going on the TMZ-front, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are now parents of a baby girl. More interestingly, this news came just one day after West’s hotly anticipated new album, Yeezus, leaked to the internet, and three days before the album’s official release. As expected, the child of Kanye and Kim has already learned the power of synergistic corporate marketing strategies.

6) More Netflix original programming is on the way, this time from the folks over at DreamWorks Animation. The deal involves over 300 hours of new content, making it the largest in Netflix’s short history. This is part of a larger initiative from DreamWorks to branch out into the television marketplace. They are confident their TV deals (including Netflix) will generate $100m in revenue for the company.

7) Senior Senator John McCain has asked the FCC to research and consider the benefits of a la carte cable pricing. This is in line with proposals and urgings from McCain for years to offer more options to television consumers, including proposed legislation. McCain calls the current system restrictive saying in a letter to acting FCC Chair Mignon Clybrun, “This is wrong, and action should be taken.”

8) The economic and financial upheaval in Greece hit the media sector these past weeks after the government shut down public broadcaster Hellenic Broadcasting Corp. (ERT). The canceling of all state-run broadcasts and massive layoffs led to protests around the country, which eventually spread to other European broadcasters (including Britain, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy) signing a petition and speaking out. The movements proved successful, as the Greek PM Antonis Samaras offered to bring ERT back on air with a limited staff after a court reversed an early decision siding with Samaras.

9) This past week saw the annual Licensing Expo in Las Vegas, with the entire industry reporting growth of 2.5% in 2012 by bringing in approx. $110 billion. Disney has been the unchallenged king (or princess!) for years, ranking as the world’s #1 licensor generating $39.4 billion. And they are only growing, with recent purchases of Marvel and Star Wars giving them six of the top 10 franchises worldwide.

10) Our tenth story is a bit of old fashioned rivalry between… talent agencies. An extended prank by William Morris Endeavor (WME) against rival Creative Artists Agency (CAA) saw the company put up posters around Hollywood featuring “CAAN’T” that parodied CAA’s iconic white-on-red logo. The stunt even extended to t-shirts spotted in the background of the Today show and a website, caant.com. Unfortunately for us watching, Phase 2 of the ad blitz was shut-down, with the WME claiming it is “not worth it” and “The fun we had is done.”

11) To end on a somber note, celebrated actor and terrific human being James Gandolfini passed away June 19, 2013 while vacationing in Italy. Best known for his work as Tony Soprano, Gandolfini’s work extended beyond television to film, the stage, and even voice-work (see below). The outpour of tributes, honors, and reflections speaks more for how loved he was than I ever could alone. That said, I’ll leave you this week with one of my favorite memories of his work:

The following is a list of some of the technologies I either researched or tried out. I hope that these either help others connect to the TV they’re missing or inspire readers to post their own experiences with or suggestions for getting TV while away from home. A side note: some of the technologies listed below require negotiating ethics and legalities, others less so, although none would likely be greeted with enthusiasm by American television executives.

Bit Torrent—Invented in 2001, this is, by internet standards, an ancient file-sharing service that most readers are probably familiar with. Its advantages are being well tested, having lots of users, and often providing the quickest turnover from airdate to streaming on your computer. The downsides are that relying on file-sharing isn’t the safest thing for your computer, and in May 2011, 23,000 BitTorrent users were, according to Wired magazine, the subject of the biggest file-sharing lawsuit to date in the US. Despite the problems, BitTorrent is the best known and most-used of the semi-standard pirating—er… sharing—sites or services.

Streaming Services—Various streaming services from Netflix to iTunes or Amazon have the advantage of being perfectly legal. The downsides are pretty much everything else. iTunes is hugely expensive at $2.99 an episode for current half-hour or hour-long network shows (Modern Family and The Good Wife, for example) or $49.99 for an HD season pass, $38.99 for an SD season pass. Programs from premium channels are only available for past seasons, and there’s no guarantee of finding your show if it’s more obscure. Amazon.co.uk doesn’t offer the streaming services available in the US, and Amazon.com blocks streaming outside the US. Netflix in the UK and Ireland, while having racked up an impressive million users in the short time since its launch in early 2012, has a very limited catalog.

Slingbox—This requires you to have a friend in your home country willing to connect the sling box to his/her TV set. Basically, Slingbox gives you access to your home DVR on your computer or any other device connected to the internet. It works extremely well, and while it’s a US company, you could probably connect it to a TV in any country. The boxes cost between $179.99 and $300, and the newest box, while top-of-the-line, mostly looks hard to stack with all the other black boxes that are probably connected to your TV.

AmericanTV2Go—This service essentially charges you a monthly fee for access to a centrally hosted Slingbox. I used the free trial and it was great, but ranging from $49.99-$99.99 a month, too expensive to continue regularly, especially on top of a local cable subscription.

VPN Clients—This is what I’ve settled on as the best for me. Most U.S. colleges and universities have a virtual private network that you can set up so that you can still log in to your school’s server and access your virtual learning environments, shared files and library subscriptions on days you work from home. If you’re abroad temporarily, you can use your home university’s vpn and connect to the internet in your home country, giving you access to any streaming content available there. If that’s not an option, for $7/month, companies like Strong VPN will let you log in to a vpn in another country. Strong only has networks available in the US and the UK right now, but for a bit more per month, PC-Streaming offers networks in Canada, Australia, and several European countries; you could likely find similar services connecting you to wherever your home country is.

Acknowledging, of course, that matters of scale would keep this franchise a far less lucrative merchandising opportunity, the fantasy genre (and Sean Bean’s intertextual appeal across the two franchises) does elicit certain comparisons. A recent deal with Dark Horse Comics might sound fairly familiar to those who have read Kristin Thompson’s detailed study of the franchising process surrounding The Lord of the Rings, given that it includes both high-end merchandise (like character statues, character busts or prop weaponry) as well as more commercial forms of licensed materials (like the pictured coasters or trading cards, which fans took up as a [spoiler-filled] hashtag in the wake of the announcement). While the latter may appear on a comic book store’s counter, the former appeal to more “hardcore” fans that desire “official” merchandise of a high quality and value authenticity.

Authenticity is a key term here, given that HBO is clearly invested in questions of quality as it relates to their programming. In fact, the licensing process for the series seems to me to be a question of balancing a level of control over the quality of products related to the series and an effort to both monetize and expand their audience (and thus their subscription base). Before the first season began, they maintained tight control over licensed products, releasing a small collection of t-shirts and other merchandise to their online HBO Store (and its New York City retail location).

However, as the season unfolded, they continually added more merchandise, including a number of t-shirts that immortalized particular quotes from the series. These were often off-handed references rather than key moments (like this “I Made The Eight!” t-shirt that many casual viewers might not even recognize as a line from the series), but they offered an immediate and, more interestingly, serialized form of licensing that would keep fans visiting the site on a weekly basis. The store has grown to nearly 150 items since the first items – two t-shirts bearing logos for the series – appeared in December of last year, and it is the first series-specific store listed on the sidebar of the HBO Store website (above the similarly lucrative, and more highly rated, True Blood).

Now that they are expanding their licensing agreements, however, they are handing over more control to independent companies in the buildup to the second season. In the case of the upcoming video game release developed by Cyanide Studios and published by Atlus for XBox 360, PS3 and PC, however, they are handing over more control than they would like. The video game rights to Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series were sold separately from the TV rights, which meant that HBO found themselves with a lucrative licensing opportunity that someone else controlled. A compromise has led to a branded game that will bear the likenesses and voices of actors from the series but remain in the hands of Cyanide, although HBO made efforts to acquire the gaming rights outright before settling on this arrangement.

However, while HBO intends on promoting the game (which will be released around the time of the second season premiere, alongside the Dark Horse merchandise and the Season One DVD/Blu-Ray release), this foray into licensed games moves them further away from the discourses of quality that drive their brand identity. Generally considered to be rushed titles designed as promotional tools as opposed to satisfying gaming experiences, licensed titles are fairly maligned within the gaming community, and the relatively little information available about this title before its release does little to suggest this will break that particular trend (although that George R.R. Martin was involved in the game’s story could engender some goodwill among fans).

This is not the first licensed game based on a fictional HBO series, as The Sopranos: Road to Respect debuted in 2006, but that (poorly reviewed) game was an effort to monetize a long-running property towards the end of its run. By comparison, the Game of Thrones game comes at a crucial juncture for the series, and will be part of a major marketing push designed to transform the franchise from a cult hit into a mainstream phenomenon. However, if corners are cut in terms of quality in the midst of aiming for this transformation, it is possible that licensing could complicate the quality TV discourses that HBO stakes its brand on (and which earned the series two Primetime Emmy awards and a nomination in Outstanding Drama Series), and could also frustrate the same fans who have responded so positively to HBO’s merchandising efforts to this point (including, as I’ve written about elsewhere, the pre-air transmedia experience campaign organized by Campfire).

The former point raises larger questions about HBO’s relationship with genre franchising that this post doesn’t have time to address. However, regarding the latter point, the economic realities of the series’ production have been highly visible within fan discussion, as the substantial cost of production raises serious questions of the series’ longevity (especially given the length of subsequent volumes, which would push an adaptation of even just the existing books to 6+ seasons). Fans know that licensing opportunities like this are an important space where additional seasons could be rendered financially viable, and thus might embrace a mediocre licensed title or a cheesy fridge magnet if it means HBO has the potential to continue adapting the series for years to come.